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Monday, September 30, 2013

Eve Rubicon - An Open Letter to Eelis Kiy

I stayed up for the winter 'expansion' announcement on Thursday night. It was midnight local time and I was like a kid on Christmas Eve with CCP Guard as Santa Claus. I went to bed 40 minutes later in a huff and kicked the cat* on my way. My prediction of what we'd get in the winter 'expansion' got the EAF balancing right but was well off on everything else.

I have written three blog posts on the subject of the Rubicon announcement and have deleted them all. I'm struggling to make my point without letting bitter vet syndrome and my disappointment control the post. And I've failed each time. Previous deleted titles have included:-

DUST514 - The New Incarna/18 months?Rubicon - Disappointed!How Do You Define An "Expansion"?

In the end I went with the title you see on the top. Lets see if I can do this!

Note - Those of you who have read this blog may have seen me mention Eelis before. She is one of the people who got me really into Eve (along with her other half Rashmika and a couple of others from my first player corp I was in) and she certainly got me into blogging. Eelis quit Eve just after the summer of rage. The direction CCP was taking was one of her reasons as I recall. Anyway with the death of Warhammer Online (which she was playing) and Eve's winter 'expansion' just around the corner, I write this.....

Have you heard? CCP have announced their 20th free 'expansion', Rubicon. I thought I'd write to you and tell you about it to try and get you back into the game. With Rashmika and Enzlo already back and in QCats, we just need you and Jester to return to the game and we'd be all sorted. Check out these features of Rubicon....

Hi-Sec POCO's
Not sure you were around when player owned customs offices were deployed allowing those doing planetary interaction to have their goods shot into space and stored in the customs office. Now they are going to be player owned in hi-sec. Many are asking what will be the point as hi-sec PI makes so little money why invest in player POCOs? The answer is of course plenty of carebear griefing.

Four Deployable Structures.
They are creating a "POS thief" structure. You deploy this near someone's POS and it leeches moon material or reactions from the POS allowing you to steal them if the POS owner doesn't notice. Not sure how you'll deploy it or pick up the goods if the POS has guns on it though?
Another one is a small 'homebase' storage/fitting service. Basically a home-away-from-home. If you can store a few fitted ships in it, it could be useful for faction war forward deployments into enemy space. However you can scan them down and destroy them and they have no defences. So could get expensive if the enemy has probes out.
The 'looter' is another one you can deploy inside a mission and it'll tractor beam all the wrecks together and loot them all. You'll have to manually salvage the wrecks, but at least all the loot from multiple wrecks will be in one place to scoop.
Mobile cyno jammer - Want to prevent your hotdrop from being hotdropped? This deployable structure will stop more cyno's being lit in a certain radius as yet to be decided (70km? 100km?)

Revamp of the Certificates System
You know those certificates nobody really cared about, they are being revamped!

SoE Faction Ships
We are getting two new bright-white ships! A SoE frigate and cruiser. Armour resist bonus, probing bonus and can fit covert ops cloaks. I doubt the DPS will anything to speak of and as T1, those frigates with cloaks are going to be a favourite of the LP farmers in faction war. They do look good though!

Ship Rebalancing
Interceptors are getting a boost and will be immune to bubbles! Interdictors are being balanced as are Marauders. Sounds like Marauders might get some siege-mode-lite to 'deploy' as DPS monsters. EAF are getting a boost to range of ewar effects to bring them closer to recons. Just what we need in game, more kitey shit you cannot catch that kills you epically slowly from extreme range!

Warp Changes
The warp speed of ships didn't usually make much of a difference did it? By the time you'd accelerated to max warp and then slowed down again, the actual time spent at full warp speed was minimal. That is being balanced. Cruisers will be the benchmark with anything smaller getting up to, and down from, max warp a lot quicker. Battlecruisers and up will take longer. Therefore small ships will be able to catch larger ships that are fleeing much more easily.

Guerilla Warfare
Something is being put in to allow small gang warfare to annoy the mega alliances and power blocs. No details yet.

So there you go Eelis, the quick guide to the features (so far announced) of the Rubicon 'expansion'. Yes, I know there doesn't seem to be a lot. Yes, it is an 'expansion' in the loosest possible terms when compared to something like Apocrypha. Yes, there is nothing to re-invigorate bored players or bring back ex-players... but those SoE ships do look nice! And you have to remember that the development resources are needed to rescue DUST. But didn't you see in the above, Interceptors will be immune to warp bubbles!!! Apparently for some, this five second coding change suggested by a player on the forums makes everything all right and elevates this from a point release to a full blown 'expansion' of awesomeness?

Have I convinced you to hand in your ex-player-bitter-vet card and rejoin Eve Online? No? To be honest I didn't convince myself here either.

Anyway, if Rubicon doesn't float your boat why not come back for the future? The future expansions after this one will be epic! CCP have an epic plan of epicness as they told us at fanfest, but gave no details. And they told us this exact same thing again last Thursday... 6 months later... but again with no details. This is starting to feel a lot like "18 months again", technically we're a third of the way there already. And if I see that picture of Badgers building stargates again with no details I WILL kick the sodding cat!

Hugs n kisses

Drack-bitter-vet-getting-bitterer-by-the-hour-arn

*No, I didn't really kick the cat, but I was in a foul mood and could have done!

P.S. Yes bro, I am mad.

P.P.S. No I wouldn't like a little cheese with my whine.

P.P.P.S. This is the version with 58% less moaning, 45% less CCP bashing and nearly 200% less DUST514 bashing, you should have seen it before!

6 comments:

Dude, don't oversell it now will you. On a plus the expansions for Eve are free and "Rubicon" is easy to pronounce unlike Apocrywhateverthefuck.

It's been so long for me now that expansion content goes over my head but I gotta say Inty boost and warp speed changes sound neato, Guerilla Warfare thing has me curious and yeah I love that new SOE ship that looks like something out of Star Wars. Not sure about the "Mobile cyno jammer" - I loved lolworthy hot-drop escalations - that kind of shit made us raise our game in earlier SoTF days - but as jammer is not system wide I guess this will not stop them, just make them more interesting/complicated?

It's been probably 2 years since I played Eve properly but I would love to come back and get my pewpew on. People are so soft in other games, it is depressing and yeah I'm sad WAR is closing. Eve has no sexy Dwarf characters. Finding the time for Eve is hard though, plus I'm tied up making penis-monsters in Spore atm. Fly wasted o/

BTW what happened with DUST? When it launched everyone was like "WHOAA!" but it seems more "ugh" now. Not worked out so well? How has the link with Eve worked - do the dust bunnies have much impact on stuff in Eve/FW?

Rubicon isn't an expansion - its a Point Release. Odyssey wasn't an expansion - it was a Point Release. To call it an expansion they would need to actually add something like...I don't know....features, gameplay perhaps? Right now they are adding two ships and four space yurts - everything else is rebalance. I think it maybe time to give my subscription money to a game developer actually deserving of it - I am sick of financing DUST 514.

Yeah it sucks and it majorly lacks vision. But then again we have been spoiled by Apocrypha.

Remember Quantum Rise, that one brought a total of 1 ship (Orca) yes 1...and nanoNERF and that was it! Talking about the major coding challenge that was! In comparison Rubicon is a whole new game...now I just made myself sad!

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